Over the last few years, a diverse group of enterprising Georgetown professors have been looking for fresh ways to integrate the arts into classes that would normally be taught and received in a traditional classroom setting with traditional didactic methods. Dissatisfied with an educational philosophy that confines learning to textbooks, memorization, and tests, these professors see merit in courses that force students out of their comfort zones and encourage them to use their minds in inventive ways.
According to professors from a range of disciplines from Philosophy to Politics, perhaps it’s time to restructure how Georgetown teaches. It seems the way forward is fostering a more creative approach to education. Art, in the form of performance, painting and sculpture, or design, has the potential to push our minds to see even the most classic issues in a radically different light.
One of the most distinct marriages of art and reason at Georgetown can be found in the new Interdisciplinary Studies course: EthicsLab Design Studio. The project is a unique initiative spearheaded by Georgetown’s world-renowned Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Its aim is to develop new approaches and solutions to highly complex real-world bioethical issues using methods adapted from innovation and design labs.
Co-taught by Associate Professor of Philosophy Maggie Little and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Design Ann Pendleton-Jullian, the class is an experimental pilot project in bioethical innovation. Although highly unsure of what exactly they’ll find, both professors and their students are eager to approach classic and complicated medical issues in such an unusual way.
Hilary Cohen (COL ‘14), a Philosophy major enrolled in EthicsLab, is unsure of how design can be integrated with a seemingly unrelated field. But, having taken Pendleton-Jullian’s “The University as a Design Problem” course last spring and seeing how successful a design approach to projects can be, she is excited for this semester’s experiment.
“Before [last] semester, I had never done anything design- or architecture-related, but it’s difficult to express how happy I am to have stumbled upon the new way of thinking it has enabled,” Cohen said. “The infusion of design [into traditionally non-creative fields] radically transformed my thinking.”
She has high hopes for EthicsLab. “I hope to grow as a purely analytical bioethical thinker but also to significantly increase the number of cognitive tools available to deploy for analysis,” Cohen said.
The idea that tools traditionally associated with the right brain can inspire an entirely new angle or paradigm of analysis to a “left brain-heavy” discipline is spreading across diverse fields of study at Georgetown. This trend can also be found in the policy-minded School of Foreign Service.
Last semester, former Ambassador to the Netherlands and SFS adjunct professor Cynthia Schneider and Professor of Theater and Performance Studies (TPST) Derek Goldman co-taught a unique class integrating theater and performance into international politics.
The inspiration for the CULP course, entitled Diplomacy and Culture, came from what Professor Goldman deemed an “existing momentum” at Georgetown. According to Goldman, Georgetown students and the University at large are unique in that they express a deep passion for international affairs. Coupled with that passion is a zeal for the arts, particularly as expressed in cultures across the globe.
Curiously, Professor Goldman and Professor Schneider had been working towards a similar goal of integrating performance and international politics before they crossed paths. While Professor Schneider had been teaching CULP courses in the SFS, Professor Goldman had been teaching political theater courses in the College.
“Derek and I essentially found one another because he had been bringing fantastic, cutting-edge theater companies to perform at Georgetown, such as the Belarus Free Theatre, a leading dissident theater company, and I was teaching about the same kind of thing in my classes,” Schneider said. “We met and discovered our similar aspirations of addressing and examining some of the challenges the world is facing through culture, particularly through theater.”
At Georgetown, an institution renowned for its leading voice in the field of international relations, Professors Schneider and Goldman believe it is particularly important to showcase artists, performers, and other narrative voices in world affairs.
“With Derek representing the creative aspect and me representing the policy side, we could create an interdisciplinary initiative that would bring students together in order to offer them, as well as the larger Georgetown and Washington communities, a new critical perspective on contemporary challenges,” Schneider said.
When Professors Schneider and Goldman offered the course for the first time last spring, 50 students enrolled, approximately half of whom were theater students and half of whom were students studying international affairs.
Though the non-theater participants might have initially been uncomfortable in throwing themselves into an unfamiliar setting, they were surprisingly receptive to the idea of learning through performance. Theater students, accustomed to the vulnerability that comes with exposure to a live audience, found themselves amused as they watched their peers squirm during acting exercises in class.
“Watching SFS students being told to pass on and mold energy with their bodies, from one person to the next, I realized how rare it is that we are asked to express ourselves physically, especially in the classroom. Or, for that matter, how rare it is that a professor asks us to rise out of our chairs and interact with each other and our environment,” said TPST and Government double major Chase Meacham (COL ‘14), reminiscing on one of his most memorable experiences from the semester.
To those invested in this course, the value of personal expression is too frequently overlooked in the academic world of international politics. Schneider and Goldman wish to transmit to their students that there is a value and purpose to these exercises and, more broadly, to art in general that cannot be communicated through other media. Schneider believes that “it is through our emotions we make decisions”—as such, the power emotions hold needs to be utilized to see new perspectives and effect change.
“When you are immediately wrapped up in a story and it makes you think about yourself and your world in a different way, you’re in a vulnerable state,” Schneider said. “When I was Ambassador, I found that taking advantage of the exact moment immediately following a performance in order to generate an in-depth discussion can allow an incredible kind of conversation where people are more open and willing to reevaluate the way they saw things before and learn from each other.”
Schneider and Goldman aren’t the only professors at Georgetown to see the importance of reevaluating preconceived notions. Indeed, the idea that art can take us places reason and science can’t is quickly growing at Georgetown.
This semester, Assistant Professor and Field Director of CULP Shiloh Krupar is teaching a class entitled “Globalization, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Exhibitions,” in which students will get the opportunity to examine the role art museums play in regional or national values, culture, and socio-political structures.
Like the other artistic learning initiatives at Georgetown, the material of the course doesn’t always draw from textbook readings or even analysis of art in the classroom. Rather, the course uses the resources of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and is being co-taught by the Director of the Center for the Study of Modern Art and Curator-at-Large, Dr. Klaus Ottmann.
The partnership between the Phillips Collection and Georgetown was established last year, when Dr. Ottmann approached SFS dean Carol Lancaster about the possibility of finding some way to work with SFS undergraduates.
Dr. Ottmann’s inspiration for a joint class that could give students a hands-on approach to the modern world through the visual arts came from his realization that art fairs and exhibitions have gained greater importance over the last 15 years, in a way “becoming the main forum for cultural politics.” Moreover, Dr. Ottmann shares Goldman and Schneider’s belief that the power of art is too often underestimated.
“Artists need to be put to work,” Dr. Ottmann said. “Let’s say you have a conflict like the one in Syria. All kinds of people are working together and discussing solutions for this conflict. Why not get some other voices involved in this dialogue? Why not get some voices of people who are thinking in a different way? Artists, philosophers, writers—that’s what’s missing.”
Dr. Ottmann and Professor Krupar hope that their joint course will be a step towards a creative re-imagination of international affairs.
“Maybe for the new generation we’re teaching now, art will become a little more than a hobby,” Dr. Ottmann said. “It’s not utopian to see a younger generation slowly bring art and creative thinking into a broader dialogue.”
With this long-term goal in mind, Dr. Ottmann and Professor Krupar are devoted to providing a unique, meaningful experience for their students. Georgetown’s partnership with the Phillips Collection consists of much more than a few visits to the galleries—the Collection is granting students complete access to the galleries, the gallery’s Study Center resources, and exclusive opportunities to converse with staff and guest speakers. On-campus classes, which are lecture-based with some discussion, alternate with classes held at The Phillips Collection every other week.
Krupar’s and Ottmann’s hope is that the classes at the Phillips Collection will open up students who are too frequently insecure in their own creative abilities to talk earnestly about art.
Nevertheless, students in the course are excited for the opportunity to learn from a prestigious art institution. It’s no surprise that passionate CULP students are eager to apply their theoretical classroom knowledge of international relations and diplomacy to something more tangible, an opportunity most students of diplomacy aren’t offered.
“That we meet in a space off-campus where we have first-hand access to so many amazing resources is fantastic, and it fits well into my concentration within my CULP major, which is the study of national identities, nation-building, and national branding,” Esteban Garcia, (SFS ’15) said. “It’s all really fascinating for me both in an academic sense and just as someone who appreciates the complexities of diplomacy.”
Indeed, one of the main objectives of Krupar and Ottmann’s course is to engage these “complexities of diplomacy” in a manner novel to most students. Issues that appear as simple matters of the security dilemma or hard power dynamics are revisited with a new perspective. The inclusion of the arts adds a level of cultural understanding and sensitivity Krupar and Ottmann feel is woefully lacking in traditional American classrooms.
According to both professors and students, these kinds of courses enable participants to approach the discipline in a radically different way in order to form new connections that could re-shape their views of the world.
Of course, one way to learn about the complexities of other countries is to thoroughly analyze what their intellectuals—their writers and thinkers—are saying. It’s easy to assess the narratives of a government, which in theory should represent a country’s national identity, because they are the ones you read about through transnational media sources. In a rapidly evolving world with hundreds of competing narratives, however, it’s almost dangerous to overlook products of popular expression, like art, which represent the everyday realities of people affected.
“Take the Arab revolutions, for example. The government’s narrative was of one thing: stability under Mubarak. On the other side, the narrative of the artists and the youth through blogs and social media was completely different: of a society frustrated at every single level and poisoned by endemic government corruption,” Professor Schneider said. “You have to pay attention to both narratives, and that’s what we hope to show the students and the larger community through events and artistic media.”
Whether it be through theatrical performance, visual art, or design, these courses are setting out to challenge preconceived notions not just about Georgetown education, but the world at large. They may be only three individual pilot courses now, but if the energy and commitment of the students and faculty involved is any indication, future Hoyas should expect to show their creative sides a lot more on the Hilltop, even in the most unexpected places.
